Tradition at Wabash: Moral Idiocy, Piety, and the Gentleman’s Rule
“The student is expected to conduct himself at all times, both on and off the campus, as a gentleman and a responsible citizen.”
I remember, when I was a prospect, seeing this one sentence on some promotional material sent out by Admissions and thinking that this is a really neat idea. A college – indeed, a brotherhood – in which there are no rule manuals, no subsection exceptions to rules, and no rigid absolutist regimentation. The concept of the Gentleman’s Rule is awfully appealing. While it is still a rule, and being incredibly nebulous probably open to abuse, I figured that the Gentleman’s Rule provided for a certain measure of liberty that allowed one to live a good life and learn from one’s mistakes.
The Gentleman’s Rule is indeed a magnificent aspect of Wabash College. However, it is also seemingly faulty as well, as recent issues have forced us to see. Fundamentally, the problem with the Gentleman’s Rule is inherent in its very imprecise and translucent nature. It begs the question: “What is a gentleman?” Well, who wants to take up that question and answer it? Surely not the Administration. Why is that?
Perhaps it would be beneficial to look back at one of the most important books of the 20th century in order to answer this question. In 1948, Richard M. Weaver, an English professor at the University of Chicago, wrote a book entitled Ideas Have Consequences. It was a profound and appropriate critique on the problems with Western (particularly American) culture in the mid-twentieth century. In the introduction to his treatise, he wrote that the dilemma that his generation and society face was the “appalling problem…of getting men to distinguish between better and worse.” He continued: “There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal.” These are strong words. However, before the reader undergoes a conniption fit, remember that Weaver wrote long before notions of political correctness had invaded, captured, and salted the ground of the Ivory Tower. Perhaps it would be best to think of a “moral idiot” as a person for whatever reason incapable of making correct moral judgments.
What is a “moral idiot”? Above all things, a moral idiot would have to lack a correctly developed sense of judgment. He lacks the virtue of discrimination. Discrimination today is considered a wicked word (due to its unfortunate Civil Rights era connotation), but it must be remembered that there is such a thing as good discrimination. Discrimination simply means to be able to make right choices between good and bad, and so it is a crucial skill to right living.
However, how does one obtain the ability to discriminate well? Discrimination relies upon being taught by one’s elders. When one is a child, he is taught caution from his parents, who warn him not to take candy from the stranger or wander away too far in the mall or park. Through constant guidance by knowledgeable and responsible adults, discrimination naturally forms in a child to the extent that when an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old leaves home to go to college, they have been given the proper skills to know the difference between right and wrong and have the basic ability to act upon those decisions.
That handing down of experience and wisdom from the elders can simply be called tradition – a concept much discussed and apparently adored here at Wabash. My definition, which I acknowledge to be woefully inadequate as a comprehensive definition, of tradition is that which is handed down from individual to individual, generation to generation. An example of this “lower-case ‘t’” tradition could be Chapel Sing, where we pass on “Old Wabash” to a new year of Wabash men. Naturally, though, my definition is aimed at higher things than simply Chapel Sing.
The German philosopher Josef Pieper, in his treatise Tradition: Concept and Claim, wrote that “To hand down does not mean simply to give somebody something, to bring it, share it, or deliver it. It means rather to deliver something that has previously arrived in your hands, which was consigned to you; to share something that was handed over and handed down; to hand on something that you received – so that it can be received and handed on yet again.” We share our values and customs with those younger or newer than us. We received them ourselves from those who came before us. But where did they get their values? Where does tradition start?
Pieper said that Tradition (capital “t”) comes from above. “If it is really an essential part of the concept of tradition that everyone who transmits it, even the earliest in line, hands over something he received – that is, something that cannot be acquired or achieved by his own insight – from where and in what way does this first one receive…what is to be handed down from this day forward? When Plato answers this question with a reference to the gods and the proclamation that comes to us from them, he is also saying that anyone who accepts and “believes” that tradition is relying, strictly speaking and fundamentally, not on the ‘ancients,’ but on the gods themselves – and, to be sure, also on the fact that what was given in this very first communication in the line of tradition has reached him and sounded through the ages and the generations…the ‘ancients’ are closer to the divine sphere than the average man; they are ‘better’ than we are…by which he probably means they possess a richer fullness of being…they are the first recipients of a proclamation which flows from a divine source and which they then hand on to human beings.” Ancient, time-tested values come from a time closer to Creation and man’s once literal walk with God.
What does this all have to do with Wabash? Well, I believe that I have located the fundamental issue with the College’s problems concerning the Gentleman’s Rule. Wabash possesses tradition, but we lack Tradition. In the winter of 1832, Wabash was founded by a group of Presbyterian ministers. The official account of the establishment includes a notice that they knelt in the frigid snow and prayed invoking the Name of the Trinity. Wabash was established within the Tradition of Christianity. However, somewhere over the next 175 years or so that Tradition was lost. Luckily Wabash is blessed with a student body that by and large has a basic grounding in this Tradition, but the College itself has largely divorced itself from it – and this is at the heart of the College’s Gentleman Rule problem.
How can the College pass on what it doesn’t possess? At the very base of the Gentleman’s Rule is an expectation that the student more or less comes to Wabash with a modicum of common sense and Christian upbringing. Thankfully, for a presumable majority of Wabash students this is still the case. However, what is the College to do when this is not the case? What happens when it is faced with a case of moral idiocy? I would suggest that the College take it upon itself to attempt to instill piety into its students.
I’m certainly not suggesting turning Wabash College into a Bible college, where it imposes strict “modesty” dress codes, officially censors language, and imposes curfews. I will not even advocate for a return of the legendary (and infamous) mandatory Chapels, which were actually religious (and Christian) in nature. I firmly believe that such measures, aside from being simply ridiculous, would be counterproductive. However, that does not mean that the College should maintain a policy of religious neutrality that amounts to nothing less than a moral self-castration.
To discuss piety, I will again have to turn to Richard Weaver. In Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver wrote that “Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.” In other words, piety is not equivalent with any notion of radical individualism, a philosophy that is at the heart of the Gentleman’s Rule violations on Wabash’s campus. When someone intoxicates himself and damages property or hurts someone or himself, he is not through his actions recognizing “things larger than the ego.” He must remember that he has obligations to himself, his community (in our case, Wabash College), and his God.
Modernity offers something completely different from this. Instead, it promotes an odd combination of an emphasis on individual, hedonistic freedom with a devotion to an amorphous “brotherhood of man.” Indeed, as Weaver writes, “in the vocabulary of modernism, ‘pious’ is a term of reproach or ridicule….Now modernism encourages the exact opposite of this, which is rebelliousness; and rebellion, as the legend of the Fall tells us, comes from pride.” For this reason, “Modern civilization, having lost all sense of obligation, is brought up against the fact that it does not know what is due to anything; consequently its affirmations grow feebler.” How can modern civilization recognize its obligations without the enlightening guidance of Tradition?
For this reason, it is necessary for Wabash to reassess its non-policy towards piety and its relative from its founding Tradition. To reconfigure the slogan of Sen. George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic National Convention speech in Miami, “Come Home Wabash!” Wabash needs to return to its righteous, pious heritage in which it developed into one of the great liberal arts college in the nation. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of the Gentleman’s Rule? If the College does not desire to advocate for some form of piety (irrevocably tied to Tradition), then the Deans might as well either publish a Talmud of the Gentleman’s Rule with the official interpretations according to the proper authorities or simply throw up their hands and declare the nation’s first officially anarchic college, thus condemning Wabash to the ash heap of history. There is no need for either of those, but at the same time it is not necessary for the Gentleman’s Rule to be a nebulous concept about which we have conversation after conversation, after which everyone walks more confused and embittered than they did when they first walked into the forum. My enthusiasm for the Gentleman’s Rule has not diminished over freshman and sophomore years. The Rule is a truly astounding thing that is worthy of protection. However, perhaps it is time that the Gentleman’s Rule actually means something. Perhaps it is time for the College to reclaim the Tradition which it has forsaken to save the tradition which it so precariously holds.
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